Re: Sounds Awful
Yeah. The likes of Azure run on a 36 hour release cycle. Something that you're using might simply not work tomorrow. That's "cloud" and "progress" for you :)
Posts by Steve Cooper
76 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Oct 2007
Calling all the Visual Basic snitches: Keep quiet about it and so will he...
Apple programs Siri to not bother its pretty little head with questions about feminism
Firm fat-fingered G Suite and deleted its data, so it escalated its support ticket to a lawsuit
Monday 8th July 2019 11:42 GMT
Loving all this cloud bashing folks :)
People also don't realise how important backups are when you look at the cloud provider's SLA - with 'cold' Azure or Google storage you're only guaranteed a 99% chance that your read/write will actually work - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/support/legal/sla/storage/v1_5/ / https://cloud.google.com/storage/sla
If I had a RAID array or similar only guaranteeing 99% success of a read/write operation I'd be sending it to landfill immediately!
Facebook celebrates Independence Day by lighting up American outage maps
It's us, only backwards. DXC registers new corporate entity: World, meet *drum roll* CXD Infrastructure Solutions
Can't get infected via email if your messages aren't delivered: Seven-hour slowdown hits Symantec cloud filters
Tuesday 11th June 2019 10:47 GMT
Twitter was surprisingly quiet on this problem yesterday - drove me mad! Waiting hours for a 2FA email or something before it eventually makes it through. Maybe not many people use it any more - I remember back in the day, Messagelabs was the email filter of choice! Makes me smile how it's still called Messagelabs all over the place and not Symantec.Cloud.
Could you just pop into the network room and check- hello? The Away Team. They're... gone
No Huawei out: Prez Trump's game of chicken with China has serious consequences
What's that? Uber isn't actually worth $82bn? Reverse-gear IPO shows the gig (economy) is up
Mods I have known, Mods I have loved, Mods I have hated: Motorola's failed experiment is now a savvy techie's dream
Thursday 9th May 2019 15:57 GMT
I still love my Z2 Play - the wireless charging back is the one that's normally on, but if I'm going to be out all day/night I'll put on the extra battery in efficiency mode and won't worry that I'll be too drunk to remember to charge the phone the next morning. The phone's showing its age now though with its built in battery not what it used to be, and the USB C connector rather choosy on what cables it'll accept.
I wish they did a more of a jump in spec to the Z3 Play, I might be quite tempted by a Z4!
Sky customers moan: Our broadband hubs are bricking it
QEMU 4 arrives with toys for Arm admirers, RISC-V revolutionaries, POWER patriots... you get the idea
Take your pick: 0/1/* ... but beware – your click could tank an entire edition of a century-old newspaper
TalkTalk returns to the email hall of shame as Pipex accounts throw weekend-long wobbly
Packet's 'big boy' servers given a shot in the Arm with 32-core, 3.3GHz Ampere CPUs
Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it
Friday 8th March 2019 15:03 GMT
Interference
I had one many moons ago where I had to go to the CEO's second home in Paris to fix his home WiFi, so off I go onto the Eurostar, traipse across Paris and find his amazing 'apartment' (floor of a huge building) and see his hilarious outdoor WiFi antenna (complete with lightning arrester) and he's there complaining it's got no range. As I test I find it's an amazing signal, walk down the corridor still amazing, then all of a sudden it drops to zero. Confused I look up and see I'm now in line of sight with a large window and filling the view out of that window is the rather large transmitter (bit bigger than his router and even his outdoor antenna in the hallway) - the Eiffel Tower. Then he proceeds to tell me taxi's radios don't work here either and even TV/radio is hit and miss.
Not much I can do apart from tell him try installing cat5 everywhere and put at least one access point in every room on that side of the property!
I was on holiday in Dublin a few hours later so three capital cities in about 12 hours.
Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019
Disk drives suck less than they did a couple of years ago. Which is nice
NASA's Opportunity rover celebrates 15 years on Mars – by staying as dead as a doornail
You're an admin! You're an admin! You're all admins, thanks to this Microsoft Exchange zero-day and exploit
Um, I'm not that Gary, American man tells Ryanair after being sent other Gary's flight itinerary
Scrubtastic end to 2018 as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Arianespace all opt for another day on Earth
Do not adjust your set: Hats off to Apple, you struggle to shift iPhones 'cos you're oddly ethical
Total Inability To Support User Phones: O2 fries, burning data for 32 million Brits
Azure, Office 365 go super-secure: Multi-factor auth borked in Europe, Asia, USA
Where to implant my employee microchip? I have the ideal location
Townsfolk left deeply unsatisfied by Bury St Edmunds' 'twig' of a Christmas tree
Chinese Super Micro 'spy chip' story gets even more strange as everyone doubles down
SpaceX touches down in California as Voyager 2 spies interstellar space
Tuesday 9th October 2018 11:47 GMT
Re: Lack of Astonish!
The software has had regular updates since launch - I believe at least one major upgrade (in 1990) to make it more autonomous has taken place. It's also a small amount of code (64KB RAM I think on them, with a tape drive for storage!) so when picked apart by a team at NASA you'd hope all bugs are caught early in development.
Super Micro China super spy chip super scandal: US Homeland Security, UK spies back Amazon, Apple denials
Resident evil: Inside a UEFI rootkit used to spy on govts, made by you-know-who (hi, Russia)
Friday 28th September 2018 09:43 GMT
Freeserve
Many moons ago I worked in a local computer shop and we started noticing that when we built new PCs a Freeserve icon would appear on the desktop after a fresh Win95/Win98 installation. Turned out to be a particular motherboard (probably PCChips) we started using somehow installed an icon onto the desktop during the Windows installation. Pretty clever for the 90's!
Attempt to clean up tech area has shocking effect on kit
Friday 28th September 2018 09:37 GMT
Flickering lights
In a previous life I installed a dozen TVs up on the walls around the office displaying various monitoring information running via HDMI over Cat5 adapters from a PC 30 metres away in the comms room. I couldn't work out for ages why the TVs would randomly go blank for a few seconds then back on again until I stayed late one evening and found they worked perfectly when the office was empty. Turned out to be interference from the IR motion detectors that kept the lights on in the office was somehow inducing enough noise into the Cat5 to upset the HDMI signal when people moved! Shielded Cat 6 rather expensively fixed the problem.
Voyager 1 left the planet 41 years ago – and SpaceX hopes to land on Earth this Saturday
Azure North Europe downed by the curse of the Irish – sunshine
Monday 25th June 2018 12:43 GMT
I wonder how hot it got in there! My little rack in my shed is currently 42'C in the nice weather we're having (28'C in my garden in Essex at the mo) and I have four PCs, switch, home theatre amp and a CCTV DVR unit in there and they're all running fine. The APC UPS is emailing me every minute with an over temperature alarm but it's still working. The Cisco 2960 switch fans are screaming but it's also working fine.
Sysadmin hailed as hero for deleting data from the wrong disk drive
Monday 21st May 2018 11:45 GMT
Re: RAID
I had an awful Apricot (what happened to them?) NT4 server once at work that the RAID controller went nuts and decided to break any drive that was connected to it. I thought it was a bit odd that all three drives failed at once, so replaced them and the new ones also failed almost immediately. Put the drives into another server and they didn't work there either - no idea what the controller was doing to them. Decided to scrap the controller and use NT4's built in disk mirroring - at least if the onboard SCSI controller dies then any old PC can read the disks in the future! Worked this way for years.
Many many moons ago I did a del *.* not realising I was in c:\win directory on my dad's work IBM PS/2 P70 luggable he used to bring home at the weekends. Spent an hour or so with undelete making slightly educated guesses at the first character of each file! I got Windows 3.1 back up and running though in the end and my dad never noticed.
Tech support made the news after bomb squad and police showed up to 'defuse' leaky UPS
Friday 18th May 2018 13:31 GMT
Re: A wise person once wrote...
I don't 'live in the sticks' (Rayleigh, Essex) but have a power cut probably on average once a month, lasting for a second up to an hour - my couple of UPSes keep my kit running happily each and every time.
I love UPSes, especially the danger element. If I ever get a power cut at night I'll pop a spanner across the 48V battery pack and sit back and watch my new MAN TORCH light up.
Friday 18th May 2018 13:14 GMT
Had similar with a load of old racks in the comms room had 10+ year old APC units in the bottom of them where the battery had less capacity than a potato and were just being basically used as multiway plugs, with a building-wide UPS having been installed years ago. Cue a black building power down test. Turn it back on again and not a single 10+ year old UPS turned back on (how dare they). Cue running down to the local Robert Dyas/Maplin to buy a load of 4/6/10 way adapters and kettle leads.
CEO insisted his email was on server that had been offline for years
Tech bribes: What's the WORST one you've ever been offered?
Microsoft Office 365 and Azure Active Directory go TITSUP*
Friday 6th April 2018 13:38 GMT
I love the prelim root cause analysis and fix: "Engineers determined that instances of a backend service responsible for processing authentication requests became unhealthy preventing requests from completing.
Mitigation: Engineers performed a recovery of the impacted backend service . "
So no info at all. Someone unplugged something and plugged it back in? Someone shut down a service and restarted it? Someone ran too many copies of Doom II on a 4mbps Token Ring IPX/SPX network then went to lunch once victorious?
User asked why CTRL-ALT-DEL restarted PC instead of opening apps
Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work?
'The capacitors exploded, showering the lab in flaming confetti'
Monday 22nd January 2018 13:36 GMT
I remember in my days working as a teenager in the 90's in a local PC shop I put a floppy ribbon cable on one pin out (can't remember if it was to the side or just connected to one row of pins) and when I turned that PC on a few of the wires in the ribbon cable lit up like a light bulb.
A few years before that I remember putting in a random 4mb 72 pin stick of RAM into an IBM PS/2 model 70 and when turning that on the RAM caught fire and a thick, heavy, flow of purple smoke ran across the motherboard, onto the table and nearly made the floor before dispersing. That smelt nice.
One more credit insurer abandons Maplin Electronics
Monday 18th December 2017 14:46 GMT
Ah the early days
Maplin's first shop was opposite it's current Westcliff store on London Road in Southend in the 70's I believe - I know it from the late 80's. A blatant rip off of Bi-Pre-Pak (in West Road) from whom my dad bought components for his Heathkit style radios and amplifiers. These days they're just a bit too expensive, but still the only actual shop you can really get components from. They should be doing astronomically well with the PIC/Arduino/RaspberryPi world we're in now, just they seem to be failing at this.
They're the type of outfit Alan Sugar should be interested in - same home town as where Amstrad once were :)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
